Contact Information

Education

PhD, Minnesota, 1990

MA, Minnesota, 1985

BA, UC Santa Cruz, 1981

Courses Regularly Taught

HIS 341 and HIS 356 U.S. Women’s History (pre-1875 and 1875 to the present) HIS 557 U.S. Women’s History (graduate seminar) HIS 162 U.S. History II HIS 241 History of Sexuality in America HIS 366 History of Sexual Subcultures (LGBT) HIS 424 Topics: Sexuality and the Law in America HIS 503: U.S. Core II HIS 568: Women and Illness

Research Interests

U.S. Women’s History, History of Sexuality, Disability History, History of Psychiatry, African American History, Southern History, Feminist Theory, LGBTQ Studies

Current Research

My current project is a feminist cultural history of borderline personality disorder (BPD) in the modern U.S. Psychiatric professionals characterize and often disparage BPD as a female illness (approx. 75%), unresponsive to psychopharmacology or psychotherapy. Although highly contested, BPD has received little historical attention. The study examines the emergence of BPD as a category of pathology; the meanings invested in the figure of “the borderline” by medical professionals, the mentally ill, and in popular culture; and the cultural and intellectual “work” BPD has done within psychiatry, within broader cultural and political discourses of gender, and among people affected by BPD. In addition to this research, I also continue to write on women’s sport, lesbian history, sexuality, and chronic illness.

“Come Out, Come Out Whatever You’ve Got; or Still Crazy After All Those Years,” Feminist Studies (Spring 2003): 1-11

“Women’s History in the New Millennium: A Conversation across Three ‘Generations’,” with Anne Firor Scott, Sara Evans, and Elizabeth Faue, Journal of Women’s History, Part I in 11 (Spring 1999): 9-30; Part II in 11 (Summer 1999), 199-220.

“Spirited Youth or Fiends Incarnate: The Samarcand Arson Case and Female Adolescence in the South,” Journal of Women’s History 9 (Winter 1998).

Best Book (1994) in Sport History, North American Society for Sport History, Awarded 1995

Affiliations and other notes

I have affiliations with the Center for Disability Studies and Global Gender Studies; I participate in the Humanities Institute and the Institute for Research and Education on Women and Gender (IREWG).